Adiabatic quantum algorithm for multijet clustering in high energy physics

Abstract

The currently predicted increase in computational demand for the upcoming High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) event reconstruction, and in particular jet clustering, is bound to challenge present day computing resources, becoming an even more complex combinatorial problem. In this paper, we show that quantum annealing can tackle dijet event clustering by introducing a novel quantum annealing binary clustering algorithm. The benchmarked efficiency is of the order of 96%, thus yielding substantial improvements over the current quantum state-of-the-art. Additionally, we also show how to generalize the proposed objective function into a more versatile form, capable of solving the clustering problem in multijet events.